]]>Fifty-five years ago this April, Martin Luther King, Jr., was sitting in a jail cell in Birmingham. King was from Atlanta; some questioned “what’s this outsider doing in Birmingham?” King’s response, in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was:

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

King felt he had to respond to the call for aid.

A call for aid is the starting point for oppressed people seeking their rights. We see the same thing in this week’s Torah portion, Vaera, when God tells Moses,

I have now heard the moaning of the Israelites because the Egyptians are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant.

It’s nice to think that such a cry would be unnecessary. It’s nice to think that as mankind evolves, we wake up on our own and would grant oppressed people their rights.

It doesn’t work that way. As Dr. King said, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

The starting point for change is when the oppressed cry out. But, of course, crying out alone isn’t enough. Someone has to listen. Those of us in positions of power or privilege are charged with listening to the cries of the oppressed. And doing something about it.

What if we’re not the oppressors? Do we really need to get involved in something that’s “not our fight?” To put it somewhat crassly, if it doesn’t involve Jews do we have to care?

Yes, we have to care.

This is a lesson we can learn from Moses. In last week’s parsha there were three occasions when Moses acted righteously. In the first instance, an Egyptian taskmaster was beating a Hebrew slave. Moses killed the taskmaster. From this we learn that we should rise to the defense of a fellow Jew being attacked by a non-Jew. The second occasion is when Moses sees two Jews fighting, and he intervenes, seeking to break it up. This shows that we need to involve ourselves in seeking peace in disputes that are strictly among Jews. And the third occasion is when Moses gets to Midian, he sees some shepherds driving off women who were watering their flock. Moses rose to their defense, and the women, including his future wife Zipporah, were able to water their flock. From this we learn that we are also charged with intervening when there is an injustice among non-Jews. The biblical charge “tzedek, tzedek, tirdof,” “justice, justice, you shall pursue” means we must pursue justice anywhere we see an injustice, whether we’re personally involved or not, whether the injustice involves Jews or not. As Dr. King pointed out in his letter, we’re all interrelated:

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

Abraham provides another model for the need to speak up for others. When God tells Abraham that he’s going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because they’re so wicked, Abraham argues with God in one of the most chutzpadik passages in the Torah:

Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? What if there should be fifty innocent within the city; will You then wipe out the place and not forgive it for the sake of the innocent fifty who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?

The prophet Jonah, I suppose, could also be seen as a kind of “outside agitator.” Jonah, a Jew living in Israel, gets sent (by God) to Nineveh, a non-Jewish town in Iraq, to save the people there, to warn them if they don’t change their ways they’ll be destroyed. Jonah wasn’t eager to save the people of Nineveh – in fact, when God taps him for the role he jumps on a ship headed for Spain, the opposite direction, trying to get as far away from it as possible. But Jonah couldn’t dodge his responsibilities, just as we shouldn’t dodge ours. We must come to the aid of oppressed or endangered people wherever they may be.

Dr. King wrote about how we’re all interrelated, and that’s a very Jewish teaching. It’s a message often repeated in the Jewish tradition.

The point is made with the very creation of people. The Torah says that mankind was created “b’tzelem Elohim,” in the divine image. All of mankind – not just Jews, or white people or brown people or any one group of people. We’re all created in the divine image. Not only that we’re all family – we all share common ancestors, Adam and Eve. And science confirms that we all have both a common male ancestor and common female ancestor.

The midrash brings a curious teaching on this point. There’s a famous injunction in the Torah, “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” R. Akiva says: This is a great principle in the Torah. Ben Azzai says: (Bereshith 5:1) “This is the numeration of the generations of Adam” — This is an even greater principle.

Why should “this is the numeration of the generations of Adam” be a greater principle than “love your neighbor as yourself?” There’s a meta-message in the seemingly boring genealogy, with all of its “begats.” The message that we’re all related. We’re all family. And everyone knows you’re obligated to come to the aid of your family member who’s in trouble.

All too often when there’s injustice, many of us just ignore it. Fail to pay attention to it. Dr. King addressed that “silent majority” when he wrote,

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

When I read the line about the white moderate, “who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice,” I couldn’t help but think of many of my fellow Israelis who don’t care about what happens to Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank as long as there is the “negative peace” of no violence. That’s not enough. We need to strive for real peace, for justice.

There is no denying that Birmingham in 2018 is a very different place than Birmingham in 1963. Yet there is still much work to be done.

We may not even know the injustices that are right in front of our eyes. I was talking to someone the other day who grew up in Birmingham who said when she was little, no one gave much thought to segregation – colored water fountains and the blacks sitting in the back of the bus just seemed “normal.”

That’s why the oppressed need to speak up. They need to remind us that, “no, that’s not normal.”

Our African American neighbors are telling us there are still a lot of racial problems in America, in Alabama, in Birmingham.

And white people, for the most part, aren’t seeing the problems.

A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 38% of whites agree with the statement “our country has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights to whites.” Only 8% of blacks agree. And the whites that don’t think we’re there yet, are at least optimistic that we’ll get there – only 11% of whites say the country will NOT make the changes needed to give blacks equal rights. Yet 43% of blacks – nearly half of all blacks – not only don’t think we have equality now, they don’t think they’ll ever achieve racial equality in this country.

An overwhelming majority of blacks – 84% – say blacks are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police. Only 50% of whites acknowledge what seems obvious to most black people. According to the ACLU, the government’s war on drugs has led to police pulling over black drivers in far greater numbers than white drivers in a search for illicit drugs. White people don’t talk about a problem with “Driving While White.” Yet many blacks, including veterans, professors, and sports stars, can tell stories about being pulled over for the crime of “Driving While Black.”

It’s not acceptable that 43% of blacks don’t think they’ll ever achieve equality in America. That’s not right. That’s not justice. We need to do better.

It’s only by listening to the cries of the disadvantaged that we’ll be able to live up to the ethical ideals of the Jewish tradition – and follow the example set for us by Abraham and Moses.

I close with the words Dr. King used to close his letter from that Birmingham jail cell:

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

]]>Sermon delivered at the Southside Faith Community Interfaith Thanksgiving Celebration at St. Mary’s on the Highlands Episcopal Church, Birmingham, Alabama, November 21, 2017.

Nowadays, Thanksgiving is the quintessential secular American holiday. Recent surveys show 95% of Americans will spend the holiday with family; 88% of Americans will be eating turkey Thursday night, and some of that other 12% are vegetarians celebrating the holiday with a non-meat option.

It’s a holiday that people from any faith tradition can enjoy – it’s not a “religious holiday” tied to any one religion. All religions that I know of praise cultivating an “attitude of gratitude,” being thankful for the bounty in one’s life.

The spirit of the holiday is captured by George Washington’s 1789 proclamation recommending the 26th of November as a day of Thanksgiving:

…to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation;

In many ways, however, Thanksgiving has strong Jewish roots.

The Puritans who fled England in 1620 on the Mayflower strongly identified with the Old Testament – or as we Jews prefer to call it, the Hebrew Bible – and the Jews of ancient Israel. They studied the Bible in the original Hebrew – there was even a proposal at one time to make Hebrew the official language of the colonies (partly because they hated everything English). Wouldn’t that have been cool! They believed their own lives were a literal reenactment of the stories of the Bible, an oppressed people leaving for the freedom of a promised land.

The Jewish concept of the covenant was at the heart of Puritan religious communities – Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop said “we shall find the God of Israel is among us, but if we deal falsely with our God…we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going,” language that echoes the Torah, the Hebrew Bible.

The original Thanksgiving may have been based on Judaism’s fall harvest festival, Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles. The holiday is described in the Bible in the book of Deuteronomy:

After the ingathering from your threshing floor and your vat, you shall hold the Feast of Booths for seven days. You shall rejoice in your festival, with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your communities. You shall hold a festival for the LORD your God seven days, in the place that the LORD will choose; for the LORD your God will bless all your crops and all your undertakings, and you shall have nothing but joy.

One of my favorite commandments: וְשָׂמַחְתָּ֖ בְּחַגֶּ֑ךָ rejoice on your holiday. We’re commanded to be happy!

Another certain inspiration for the Pilgrims to celebrate Thanksgiving is found in another part of the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Psalms, Psalm 107 in particular which the Pilgrims were certainly familiar with – here are some excerpts:

Praise the LORD, for He is good; His steadfast love is eternal!” Thus let the redeemed of the LORD say, those He redeemed from adversity…Some lost their way in the wilderness, in the wasteland; they found no settled place. Hungry and thirsty, their spirit failed. In their adversity they cried to the LORD, and He rescued them from their troubles. He showed them a direct way to reach a settled place. Let them praise the LORD for His steadfast love, His wondrous deeds for mankind; for He has satisfied the thirsty, filled the hungry with all good things… In their adversity they cried to the LORD and He saved them from their troubles. He gave an order and healed them; He delivered them from the pits. Let them praise the LORD for His steadfast love, His wondrous deeds for mankind. Let them offer thanksgiving sacrifices, and tell His deeds in joyful song.

Prayers of thanksgiving are some of the most important and prominent prayers in the Jewish tradition. Every day, very first thing in the morning, before even getting out of bed, Jews traditionally start their day with a prayer of thanksgiving, modeh ani lifanecha melech chai v’kayam, sh’hechezarti nishmati b’chemla, raba emunatecha, I am grateful before you, living and enduring king, who has compassionately returned my soul to me, great is your faithfulness.
Psalm 100, another psalm of thanksgiving, is part of our daily weekday liturgy, recited every weekday:

A psalm for praise. Raise a shout for the LORD, all the earth; worship the LORD in gladness; come into His presence with shouts of joy. Acknowledge that the LORD is God; He made us and we are His, His people, the flock He tends. Enter His gates with praise, His courts with acclamation. Praise Him! Bless His name! For the LORD is good; His steadfast love is eternal; His faithfulness is for all generations.

In the Jewish tradition, we say blessings both before and after eating. The blessing after eating is considered a biblical commandment, as it says in Deuteronomy 8:10, וְאָכַלְתָּ֖ וְשָׂבָ֑עְתָּ וּבֵֽרַכְתָּ֙ אֶת־יקוק אֱלֹקֶ֔יךָ עַל־הָאָ֥רֶץ הַטֹּבָ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר נָֽתַן־לָֽךְ, “when you have eaten and are satisfied you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you.”

That passage in the Torah continues with an enjoinder to remember to be grateful to God when we have eaten our fill, when we have fine houses, when we have herds and flocks and silver and gold – for it’s at such a time that our hearts may grow haughty. And this is still very much true today – human nature seems to be to want to blame God when things go wrong – “Why me, God?” – but to take full credit ourselves when things are going well, “I worked hard and deserve this.” No, you probably don’t deserve it – I’m pretty sure I don’t actually deserve all the blessings in my life – but God is gracious and generous with us, and we should be appropriately grateful.

I didn’t grow up in a religious observant home – we were fairly secular. When I started becoming more observant, and started saying the blessings before and after eating, I noticed it was very easy to remember to say a blessing at the start of a meal – when I was hungry, and the food that I was about to enjoy was right in front of me. It was much harder to remember to say thanks AFTER eating – once I felt satisfied, and the food was nowhere in sight. After eating, of course, is not only the biblically commanded time to say thanks, but it’s the logical time to say thanks.

Giving thanks is so important – so necessary for the soul – that we have a midrash, a rabbinic teaching that says in the time to come, in the days of the Messiah, the era when there is peace and plenty for all, all sacrifices will be annulled, except for the sacrifice of thanksgiving. All prayers will be annulled, except for the prayer of gratitude, as the prophet Jeremiah said regarding the messianic age, “The voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the groom and the voice of the bride, the voice of those who say ‘Give thanks to the LORD of hosts.’” – those are the voices that will be heard.

I would like to close with a beautiful prayer from Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement:

In the days of the Puritan pilgrims,
When they arrived in the land of their haven,
And suffered from hunger and cold,
And sang and prayed
To the Rock of their Salvation,
You stood by them in their time of trouble
And aroused the compassion
Of the native Indians,
Who gave them food, fowl and corn
And many other delicacies.
You saved them from starving and suffering,
And You showed them the ways of peace\
With the inhabitants of the land.
Feeling gratitude, they established therefore
A day of Thanksgiving every year
For future generations to remember,
And they feed the unfortunate
With feasts of Thanksgiving.
Therefore do we also thank You
For all the goodness in our lives.
God of kindness, Lord of peace,
We thank You.

]]>http://www.neshamah.net/2017/11/jewish-roots-thanksgiving.html/feed0Lech Lecha 5778 – Jewish Continuity Advice from Abrahamhttp://www.neshamah.net/2017/10/lech-lecha-5778-jewish-continuity-advice-abraham.html
http://www.neshamah.net/2017/10/lech-lecha-5778-jewish-continuity-advice-abraham.html#respondSun, 29 Oct 2017 17:05:02 +0000http://www.neshamah.net/?p=2638What is it that makes Abraham so special that God singles him out to become the first Jew? When God

]]>What is it that makes Abraham so special that God singles him out to become the first Jew?

When God spoke to Noah about the coming flood, we’re first told that Noah was a “righteous and pure” man in his generation. That explains why Noah was chosen of that corrupt generation to be the one who is saved, the one who’s the vehicle for saving a breeding couple of every species.

By the time God gets around to talking to Moses for the first time, we know a lot about Moses’ character, especially from the incident when he kills a slavemaster who was beating a Jewish laborer. Clearly he had the right kind of stuff to save the Jewish people.

But with Abraham, we know nothing about him, other than his father is Terach, before the opening line from this week’s parsha: “Lech lecha, go forth from your land, from your birthplace, from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.”

The Hebrew phrase, lech lecha, is unusual: literally, it would mean “go to you,” or “go to yourself.” Many rabbis therefore interpret this verse as meaning it’s talking about a spiritual journey, not a physical journey. Go to yourself, your inner self, your true self. Leave where you are now, and go on a spiritual journey to find yourself and to find God.

The Sfat Emet, a 19th century Chasidic rabbi, said that the message of lech lecha, go out on a spiritual journey to find yourself and God, is one that God transmits to everyone in the world, every day. Abraham was the first one to pay attention, to hear God calling, to choose to go out on that journey.

A few verses later the Torah tells us that Abraham, his wife, and his nephew all headed out on the journey, along with all the wealth they amassed, and hanefesh asher asu b’charan, the souls that they had made in Haran. Which sounds as odd in Hebrew as it does in English; what’s that mean, “the souls that they made in Haran?”

Having heard God calling, Abraham shared that news with other people – and once it was pointed out to them that God was calling on them to go on a spiritual journey, they were able to hear the call as well. And Abraham and Sarah converted them to Judaism, and they joined Abraham and Sarah on the spiritual and physical journey to the promised land.

This is kind of remarkable if you think about it – the very first thing Abraham did after hearing God call, before he even headed out on the road on his own physical and spiritual journey, was to share that message with others, and welcome converts to join him – the first convert to Judaism – on his journey.

Abraham seems to have been very eager to bring converts tachat kanfei hashechinah, under the wings of the Divine presence. So what happened? Why aren’t we out there proselytizing, seeking new converts, the way that Abraham did? And the way many other religions do? Why don’t we have Hashem’s Witnesses out knocking on doors? Missionaries sent off to darkest Africa, as in the Broadway who, The Book of Mormon?

From the days of the revolt of the Maccabees in the 2nd century BCE through the time of the destruction of the Temple in the year 70 Judaism WAS a proselytizing religion. We did actively seek converts – this is attested to by both Josephus, the most famous Jewish historian of that time frame, and Roman authors as well. A number of Roman nobles are recorded as having converted to Judaism. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but I heard one estimate that said at the peak 10% of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish. At one time, during the Maccabee era, we even converted people (notably the Idumeans) at swordpoint.

What happened?

After the destruction of the Temple, one can imagine many people would have felt that the Jews had fallen out of favor with their God. A few centuries later, as Christianity began its rise, Jews were a persecuted people. For many years, it was against the law for people to convert to Judaism. Rabbis that converted people were risking severe punishment. It was during this period of time that Jews not only stopped seeking converts, they started to actively reject people interested in conversion. This is the source of a custom still followed in much of the Orthodox world for a rabbi to reject a convert three times before accepting him or her for study. The purpose of that was to make sure the prospective convert was sincere, and not a spy from the secular authorities trying to infiltrate the Jewish people, or trying to catch a rabbi in a “sting” operation.

For many centuries, Jews didn’t exactly welcome converts, but the people who were born Jews, who were born into the covenant, stayed Jews.

“Born into the covenant” – the covenant that God made with the Jewish people is also found in this week’s Torah portion.

I will maintain My covenant between Me and you, and your offspring to come, as an everlasting covenant throughout the ages, to be God to you and to your offspring to come…Such shall be the covenant between Me and you and your offspring to follow which you shall keep: every male among you shall be circumcised…Thus shall My covenant be marked in your flesh as an everlasting pact.

Circumcision is just a sign of the covenant, it’s not the covenant itself. The covenant – the deal – is that we’ll follow God’s rules, and God will be our God. And God throws in giving us the land of Israel as a sweetener to the deal.

Assimilation wasn’t an option for our ancestors who lived in ghettos in Europe. Antisemitism was a very effective way of keeping the Jewish community intact. We lived in our ghetto and kept to our own.

That all started to change with the haskala, the “Jewish Enlightenment,” which started in Germany in the late 1700s when the German rabbi Moses Mendelssohn found that Jews could be accepted and integrated into German society – but an important starting point was they had to learn to speak proper German, not Yiddish. He translated the Torah into German and started giving sermons in German to encourage his community to learn German. The emancipation of the Jews – the granting of full civil rights to the Jews – first by France in 1791, and spreading to other countries in the 1800s – opened new doors for the Jews. There was still plenty of antisemitism however; so many Jews opted for the easy path out, and converted to Christianity. Moses Mendelssohn’s own grandson, the compose Felix Mendelssohn, took that path – which explains why we never play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March at a Jewish wedding.

While assimilation has been around as an issue for a long time, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger issue. The 2013 Pew survey was a real wakeup call to the Jewish community. Prior to 1970, the intermarriage rate among Jews was 17%; today, among non-Orthodox Jews, it’s 71%.

Intermarriage by itself doesn’t have to be a problem for Jewish continuity; we have many intermarried families in our community that are proudly raising their children as Jews; I’m a product of an intermarried family.

The big issue isn’t so much intermarriage as it is Jews giving up on their religion.

Many Jews who were “born into the covenant” consider themselves “Jews with no religion.” This is a growing phenomenon. 19% of the Jews of my generation consider themselves to have no religion; among millennials, my kids’ generation, those born after 1980, the number is 32% who consider themselves “Jews with no religion.”

What the heck does that mean? You’ll never hear a Gentile claim to be a “Christian with no religion.”

It means they were born into a Jewish family, being Jewish is part of their identity, but they aren’t at all “religious.” They don’t see themselves as having a religion.

Intermarried Jews who identify their religion as Jewish still raise their children as Jews 2/3 of the time.

On the other hand, Jews who claim to have no religion raise their children with no religion 2/3 of the time. And those children raised with no religion will certainly no longer identify themselves as Jewish at all. Clearly religious identity is a much more important issue than intermarriage.

And this is the real demographic challenge facing the Jewish people. We stopped actively seeking converts a very long time ago; which was OK when being born into the covenant was sufficient to ensure Jewish continuity. But nowadays, with high assimilation rates, unless we bring as many people in the front door as go out the back door our already small numbers will continue to diminish.

Converts are sometimes called “Jews by choice,” but the truth is we’re all Jews by choice. The ghetto walls are long gone. People freely explore all kinds of different religious beliefs, and the fastest growing religion is “none.” This is a challenge, by the way, not just for Jews – our Christian neighbors face the same issue in their communities.

Why would someone – born Jewish or not – choose Judaism?

Judaism has a great product, but our packaging needs some updating.

What do I mean by that?

For over 2,000 years, the greatest minds in the Jewish world have wrestled with the deepest questions – God, the meaning of life, how to be a good person. We have a path for connecting with God. We have created strong communities. Much of our religion is based in the home and family. We have beautiful rituals that add meaning to the sacred moments in our lives. That’s our product.

Our packaging is the way we present our accumulated wisdom – our services, classes, opportunities to connect with God and each other.

Temple Beth-El is doing the right things. We hired Sarah Metzger in a conscious effort to bring more music to our services and our community. We continue to financially support our religious school and youth groups even with diminished numbers. We offer innovative programs to engage our community.

There are three things we need to do to ensure Jewish continuity, and all three are things we learn from Avraham Avinu, our ancestor Abraham.

The first is honoring the covenant that Abraham made with God. Today we celebrate a bar mitzvah. David is making a statement today – that not only was he born into the covenant, but he has chosen to be a part of that covenant. He is a “Jewish Jew,” not a Jew with no religion. We need to continue to encourage our children to make that choice by providing them with a solid Jewish education, positive Jewish experiences such as Jewish summer camps and youth groups.

The second is following the example of Abraham at the start of his journey – we need to invite others to join us. We have much to offer a world where people are increasingly more connected to their devices than to each other, a world where people can go to a beautiful place in nature and be looking at their phones instead of appreciating the awe and wonder of being surrounded by God’s awesome creations. We don’t necessarily need to go around knocking on doors like Jehovah’s Witnesses, but we should be out there competing in the marketplace of religions, and let those who may be interested know what we have to offer.

And the third thing we need to do that we learn from Abraham is something we learn in next week’s parsha, Vayera: being welcoming. From Abraham’s example of welcoming three strangers into his tent and feeding them we learn the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim, welcoming visitors. Being a welcoming community is vitally important, whether it’s inreach – reaching out to fellow Jews – or outreach, reaching out to the broader community. Our Keruv program is exactly the right thing to be doing. We need to strengthen those efforts; every member of Temple Beth-El should view him or herself as an ambassador for our community, as part of the “welcoming committee.”

The surveys on Jewish demographics are dire. Many commentators look at the surveys and say, “If present trends continue, the only Jews left in America will be Orthodox.”

We don’t have to let present trends continue.

May the Kadosh Baruch Hu, the Holy One, blessed be He, strengthen us in our efforts to keep the light of Judaism shining brightly for many generations to come,

]]>Many of us were shocked by what happened in Charlottesville in August. The ADL describes the scene:

Marchers threw Nazi salutes as they waved swastika flags, proudly wore swastika pins and shirts, and shouted “sieg heil!” A sign carried by rally-goers warned that the “Jewish media is going down;” another declared that “Jews are Satan’s children.” A white supremacist told a reporter that “the f****** Jew-lovers are gassing us,” and another one called a Jewish counter-protestor a kike. “Blood and soil,” which the white supremacists chanted several times, is the translation of the Nazi slogan, “Blut und Boden.” And at least once, white supremacists changed their refrain, “You will not replace us” to “Jews will not replace us.”

A wide array of anti-Semitic Neo-Nazis and white supremacists participated in the rally in Charlottesville.

Vanguard America – whose followers include James Alex Fields, the man who drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one – blames Jews for Communism, the pornography industry, the corruption of the mass media, and the deaths of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. The group’s manifesto calls for eliminating the purported dominance of a “rootless group of international Jews” over the US economy.

The Traditionalist Worker Party claims that the true loyalty of American Jews is to Israel, not America. Its platform states, “the organized Jewish community’s record of deceit, duplicity, and double-standards in lobbying against American interests within the American political system is unmatched.” The organization’s leader, Matt Heimbach, has said on the record that “Hitler was a good person.”

The League of the South describes “the Jew” as “an ancient and implacable enemy of our people and civilization.” They warn the US faces a “civil war” between “the forces of Western Civilization…and the forces of Judeo-Marxism.” They describe the Holocaust as “a dubious story” told “to induce Christian guilt.”

And then there’s the National Socialist Movement, a group that venerates Hitler. Their leader, Jeff Schoep, writes “My advice is never ever remove the bright shining light off of the Jew, for it is the Jew that is the true enemy of all humanity on this planet! All the other races and racial problems we have go back to the Jew, and the focus should never be removed from them.”

The white supremacists are also busy on Twitter. I went on to Twitter to see what kind of stuff was out there under hashtags such as #killthejews #nukeisrael and #hitlerwasright.

Not that I WANT to share much of what I found with you – it made me want to vomit – but there’s very little that I even can share in a synagogue setting – it’s all laced with profanities.

Antisemitism is getting worse. The ADL reported an astonishing 86% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the first three months of 2017. And that was on top of a 34% increase in such incidents in 2016. Particularly disturbing is the fact that anti-Semitic bullying and vandalism at K-12 schools is getting much worse – as many incidents in the first quarter of 2017 as there were in all of 2016.

College campuses are also seeing an upswing in anti-Semitism, and on campus we get it from both sides.

A white nationalist group, Identity Evropa, a group that claims to “promote white culture,” has launched “Project Siege,” a promotion of its hate-filled doctrines on campus. Identity Evropa encourages “remigration:” They’d like immigrants to go back where they came from. They don’t allow Jews as members.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Palestinian-supporting far-left protestors are driving an increasingly hostile atmosphere toward Jews on some University of California campuses, CUNY, and at Northwestern University. In March of 2017, Students for Justice in Palestine at San Diego State University held an “Israeli Apartheid Week.” These groups often harass Jewish speakers, especially ones representing the Israeli-government.

The situation in Europe is even worse.

In America, anti-Semitism mostly takes the form of verbal harassment and property damage, such as graffiti or defacing synagogues or cemeteries. Serious physical assaults against Jews in America, thankfully, are still pretty rare.

That’s not the case in Europe. The Community Security Trust in the UK, a nonprofit established to ensure the safety and security of the Jewish community in the UK, warns of “unprecedented” attacks, abuse, and harassment. They recorded 80 violent assaults against Jews in the first six months of 2017.

Over the last five years a number of Jews were murdered in hate crimes in France. In 2012, a Frenchman of Algerian descent got off his motorbike in front of the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse and started firing a 9mm pistol at students and parents. He killed a 30-year-old rabbi and his 3- and 6-year-old sons. He chased down an 8-year-old girl, Myriam Monsonego, grabbed her by the hair and put his 9mm gun to her head. The gun jammed, he switched weapons, put the new gun to her head, and fired. The girl’s father arrived just in time to see his daughter executed.

In 2015, an attack at a Paris supermarket left four Jews dead. The Chabad rabbi in Malmo, Sweden, has endured over 150 anti-Semitic attacks, both verbal and physical.

French Jews have been responding to increasing anti-Semitism by making aliyah, moving to Israel, in record numbers. In 2012, 1,900 French Jews emigrated to Israel. By 2014, that number had risen to over 7,200.

How worried should we be?

I suspect most of us are “concerned,” but not terribly worried.

The violent anti-Semitism in Europe is driven by Muslim fanatics; we haven’t seen as much of that here in America, at least not since 9/11.

Even here in Alabama, a bastion of white supremacists, I don’t feel afraid to wear my kippah in public. Although, admittedly, Birmingham is something of a bubble.

Most of us have not personally experienced anti-Semitism recently. The one thing that did affect many of us, the threats against the JCC and the day school, was perpetrated by an Israeli Jew (although, it should be pointed out, others were allegedly paying him to make those threats).

My initial thought was that we don’t need to be too worried.

And then I read our own Ruth Siegler’s memoir of survival, “My Father’s Blessing.” I teared up when I read how the last time she saw her father, in Auschwitz, he gave her the birkat cohanim, the same blessing I bless my kids with (via Facetime) every Friday.

But what causes me to feel a little more worried is when she describes how surprised they were by the change in the Jews’ status.

Ruth wrote,

My family, as well as the other Jewish families of Senzenich, were treated as equals by our non-Jewish neighbors. Until I was about six years old, I felt very comfortable with the non-Jewish residents of our town. Many of my friends and those of my parents were not Jewish, and I saw no hint that any trouble for Jews in Germany was on the horizon.

But that all changed with Kristallnacht. Ruth said,

Kristallnacht was the beginning of a long nightmare for my family and millions of other German Jews. I was 11 years old at the time. The events of Kristallnacht started in the afternoon on November 9, 1938. The insanity came with no warning.

Ruth was a child in 1938; she could be forgiven for not seeing it coming. Her parents, presumably, weren’t so surprised. Everything in Germany changed in 1933. Hitler was appointed Chancellor, civil liberties were restricted in response to the Reichstag fire, Dachau opened for business, originally to hold political prisoners, Hitler declared the Third Reich and was made dictator, and state anti-Semitism began: there was a one-day, government-sanctioned, boycott of all Jewish businesses, and “non-Aryans” were forced to retire from the legal profession and civil service. Racism and anti-Semitism were the law of the land. Gay and transgender people were persecuted along with the Jews and other “inferior races.” White supremacists on steroids were in charge.

Racism and anti-Semitism were hand in hand during the Third Reich, and they are hand in hand today.

I’m not losing sleep over the increase in anti-Semitic property damage and verbal harassment in America.

What I do lose sleep over is the rise of the radical right and its hateful ideology: racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-anyone who’s not a straight, white, Christian, preferably born in America.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on “The Year in Hate and Extremism,”

The radical right was more successful in entering the political mainstream last year than in half a century … After half a century of being increasingly relegated to the margins of society, the radical right entered the political mainstream last year in a way that had seemed virtually unimaginable since George Wallace ran for president in 1968.

Fortunately, President Trump has purged the most visible members of the radical right from his inner circle. Sebastian Gorka, Mike Flynn, and Stephen Bannon, all of whom were tied to the radical right, are all gone.

Unfortunately, the seeds sown by the radical right, the seeds of division, discord, and identity politics, seem to be growing stronger by the day.

The response to the radical right has too often been to counter hate with hate.

Black nationalist groups – black racist groups – have also shown a growth spurt in response. There were 180 known such groups in 2015, 193 last year. Micah Johnson, who assassinated five Dallas police officers last year, had liked the Facebook pages of the New Black Panther Party and the Black Raiders Liberation Party before going out on his killing spree.

Another response has been the antifa movement, which is short for Anti-Fascist, or Anti-Fascist Action.

Antifa activists believe in fighting fire with fire. They reason if the radical right is violent, the radical left needs to stop them, with violence if necessary. A recent article by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic describes their tactics:

Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.

I worry that hate is contagious.

I worry that moderates express support for the radicals. I worry when moderate Republicans support the radical right’s calls for racist and anti-immigrant policies, and I worry when moderate Democrats support antifa’s use of force to limit free speech.

I worry that algorithms used by social media companies are putting us into echo chambers where we only hear the voices that we already agree with, voices that drive us to greater division as we no longer hear the other side of the story.

I worry that universities are no longer places where young people are exposed to all kinds of ideas and people; instead we have trigger warnings, antifa ready to drown out speakers from the right, and Students for Justice in Palestine ready to drown out speakers from Israel.

But all that worry, in a way, is part of the problem.

If we’re worried about something, our natural tendency is to blame someone.

Worried about crime? Blame blacks.

Worried about job security? Blame immigrants.

Worried about the banking system or the media? Blame the Jews.

Don’t like the way the election turned out? Blame the Russians, or rednecks.

Don’t like football players kneeling during the national anthem? Blame Colin Kaepernick, or, more broadly, ungrateful privileged overpaid black athletes.

Brene Brown, a professor at the University of Houston who studies empathy, says that the impulse to blame comes from living in a “scarcity culture.” And it’s an artificial scarcity, because in truth we have plenty – but people are continually being told – or telling themselves – that they’re not good enough, not safe enough, not extraordinary enough, not fill in the blank enough.

So we go out into the world “armored up.” We shield our hearts. We’re ready to kick butt, and if the world is cruel, or our boss is mean, or some idiot cuts in front of us, it bounces off our armor, and we blame others.

Armor works. It protects us. The only problem is it not only keeps bad stuff out, it keeps good stuff out. And it keeps our good stuff locked away from the world as well.

Professor Brown said, “Our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be brokenhearted.”

If we’re willing to do something scary – take our armor off – we can instead see the pain of other people, we can empathize with other people.

And empathy is very different than sympathy. You can have sympathy with your armor on. Sympathy is feeling for you; empathy is feeling with you.

Most of us don’t want sympathy. It feels like being pitied, and no one wants to be pitied. Brown is from Texas, where people will often say “bless your heart” as an expression of sympathy. I understand “bless your heart” means something a little different in Alabama – something more like “boy, are you stupid.” But she hates it as an expression of sympathy. She wants to make a t-shirt that reads “Bless my heart and I’ll punch your face.”

Empathy is about being present, being engaged, really hearing what the other person has to say, and sharing their feelings, whether it’s scared, depressed, or frustrated.

As society seems more and more divided, we all seem more and more armored up, and less and less likely to listen to each other.

The whole controversy of black athletes taking a knee during the national anthem is an interesting case study. It started out as a way to call attention to the Black Lives Matter concerns – that young African American men are not treated the same way as young white men by society, especially by the police.

It’s now spiraled completely away from that and become some sort of proxy culture war, with people taking sides for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the original motivation behind the act.

The particular action of kneeling during the national anthem, however, came about as the result of the kind of empathic, hearing each other conversation that no one today is having surrounding the issue.

Colin Kaepernik, the football player who started all this, first sat instead of standing for the national anthem as a way to call attention to racial oppression in America.

Nate Boyer, who is white, and at the time was a Seattle Seahawks long snapper and a former Green Beret combat soldier wrote Kaepernik an open letter, published in the Army Times. Boyer talked about the one time he got to stand for the national anthem at a professional football game, and said:

I thought about how far I’d come and the men I’d fought alongside who didn’t make it back. I thought about those overseas who were risking their lives at that very moment. I selfishly thought about what I had sacrificed to get to where I was, and while I knew I had little to no chance of making the Seahawks’ roster as a 34-year-old rookie, I was trying.

That moment meant so much more to me than even playing in the game did, and to be honest, if I had noticed my teammate sitting on the bench, it would have really hurt me.

He was respectful though – empathic even. He added,

Even though my initial reaction to your protest was one of anger, I’m trying to listen to what you’re saying and why you’re doing it. When I told my mom about this article, she cautioned me that “the last thing our country needed right now was more hate.” As usual, she’s right.

Kaepernik responded (reported by ESPN) by not only listening to Boyer – he arranged an in-person meeting. 49er Safety Eric Reid joined that meeting in San Diego. It was Reid who suggested kneeling instead of sitting. Boyer said,

It’s a good step, and it shows progress on your part and sensitivity and that you care about other people and how this affects them, their reaction. It’s still definitely a symbol. People take a knee to pray. In the military, we take a knee all the time. It’s one of the things we do. When we’re exhausted on patrol, they say take a knee and face out. So we take a knee like that. We’ll take a knee as the classic symbol of respect in front of a brother’s grave site, a soldier on a knee.

There’s an incredible irony at work here. The people most vehemently opposed to players “taking a knee” claim it’s disrespectful to the flag and veterans. Yet the gesture came out of a desire to do just the opposite. And not only that, the gesture was the result of a heart-to-heart, real dialog between Kaepernik and a veteran.

To be clear, I’m not saying I think taking a knee is a great idea. I don’t think it’s working. I think it’s starting a dialog about the wrong topic – instead of starting a dialog about racism, it’s starting a fight about taking a knee.

But I do think Kaepernik and Boyer were very effective role models for all of us.

Kaepernik and Boyer point the way out of this ever-escalating cycle of hate.

Kaepernik and Boyer show us how to take the wind out of the sails of the white supremacists and antifa.

We need empathy. We need to not only listen to each other, but to be willing to be vulnerable and show some empathy.

We need to stop demonizing people.

There’s a beautiful story in the Talmud about how some bandits were harassing Rabbi Meir. His wife, Beruriah, heard the rabbi praying for the death of these bandits. Beruriah said, “wait, what are you doing? Do you think this is permitted because of the verse which says “let chata’im, sins, cease?” Does it says “chota’im, sinners? NO—it says SINS.” So R. Meir changed his prayer, to one that the wicked people should do repentance. And they did repent, and stopped tormenting him.

Instead of countering hate with hate, we need to work to subvert hate. We need empathy – we need to hear what it is that has people hurt, scared, afraid. Responding with empathy instead of with hate may generate an opening for a real conversation, and a new solution, as happened when Kaepernik and Boyer actually sat down to talk.

And the first place we need to eradicate the hate is our own hearts. I don’t care who it is that you hate – Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, David Duke or Louis Farrakhan, hate isn’t the answer. We need to get past our own fears, take our armor off, and be able to empathize with others.

And we should remember that those who hate the Jews for the most part also hate others. We need to band together with other people of good faith.

Al Sharpton – a man who has had some conflict with the Jewish community in the past – wrote an opinion piece in one of the leading Israeli newspapers, Haaretz, saying that Jews and African Americans need to join together in the struggle against racism, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all of its forms.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said,

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

]]>http://www.neshamah.net/2017/10/yomkippur5778.html/feed0Kol Nidre 5778 – The Heart in Prayerhttp://www.neshamah.net/2017/10/kol-nidre-5778-heart-prayer.html
http://www.neshamah.net/2017/10/kol-nidre-5778-heart-prayer.html#respondSun, 08 Oct 2017 15:31:31 +0000http://www.neshamah.net/?p=2630Kol Nidre. Here we are at the opening service of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We have a big

]]>Kol Nidre. Here we are at the opening service of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We have a big crowd; it’s one time a year when even if there were a Crimson Tide football game, attendance wouldn’t be down much. Or at least I like to think that attendance wouldn’t be down much. If I’m wrong, let me live with my fantasy.

Rabbi Alan Lew, z”l, tells the story of how one year when he was very distant from God, it was the evening of Kol Nidre, and he had no idea. He happened to turn the TV on and there was a feature about Yom Kippur. He heard the Kol Nidre melody being played on a cello, and he said, “It went through me like a knife. That melody struck a deep chord. It went all the way in. It went straight to my soul.”

Rabbi Lew continues,

When we recite the Kol Nidre, God calls out to the soul, in a voice the soul recognizes instantly because it is the soul’s own cry. You may have come to this service for other reasons. Nevertheless, here you are, sitting in your body, and suddenly your soul hears this music and it gives a jump, and it startles you. Your soul is hearing its name called out, and its name is pain, grief, shame, humiliation, loss, failure, death—or at least that is its first name. That is the name the first few notes of the Kol Nidre call out.

I’ve never heard anyone complain that Kol Nidre is boring. The combination of the haunting melody, the presence of the entire community, the feeling that this is the time we’re trying to get it together to start the New Year with a clean slate, all lead to engaging our hearts. Even if we don’t understand the Hebrew, we can feel a connection with our community and with God through an ancient and moving ritual.

Prayer is NOT fundamentally an intellectual exercise. Prayer is from and about the heart.

Psalm 102 describes one kind of prayer beautifully: “A prayer of the afflicted when he is overwhelmed and pours out his complaint before God.” Prayer is about pouring your heart out to God. The most beautiful and moving prayer in the entire Torah is a simple one that Moses offers on behalf of his sister Miriam when she was afflicted with tsuris, a sort of spiritual leprosy: El na rafa na la, Please God, heal her!

The urge to pray comes from that urge to pour out one’s heart before God. The origins of prayer are not only in requests, in asking for things, whether material or spiritual. The origins of prayer are in crying out. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, z”l, describes it, “[prayer] is a cry; an elementary outburst of woe, a spontaneous call in need; a hurt, a sorrow, given voice. It is the call of human helplessness directed to God. It is not asking, but coming with one’s burden before God. It is like the child’s running to the mother because it hurts.” Prayer is not just about asking for things—it’s about having a relationship with God. If your child falls down and gets hurt and comes running to you, it’s not so much for the “Barbie Band-Aid” as it is for the comfort of being close to a parent. Being held, being told it will be OK.

You tell a spouse how you feel—frustrated, lacking, lonely, stressed—and you not only feel closer to your spouse, but you also feel comforted just having someone listen. If you are having a good time, things are going well, and you are happy, you also want to share that with your spouse. That’s what prayer is about. To know that God is listening, that God is there, that God cares.

So what happens to our hearts during synagogue services during the rest of the year? For all too many people, the heart goes missing, and services seem boring. As Abraham Joshua Heschel described us in his 1953 essay “The Spirit of Jewish Prayer”: “[P]eople who are otherwise sensitive, vibrant, arresting, sit there aloof, listless, lazy. … They recite the prayerbook as if it were last week’s newspaper. … Prayer must have life. … It must not be flattened to a ceremony, to an act of mere respect for tradition.”

And nowadays many people don’t even sit there – they vote with their feet, and find other more engaging things to do on Saturday morning.

What happened to our prayers? How did our prayers go from “a spontaneous call in need,” to “please turn to page 223?”

I think we have two problems.

And both are fixable.

The first problem is that we Jews are, to a large degree, far too much in our heads and not enough in our hearts when it comes to God. Too many of us may believe in God in an abstract kind of way, without really having a relationship with God.

This is a bigger problem in Conservative Judaism than in other denominations. The biggest seminary for Conservative rabbis, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, is one of the premier institutions for the study of Judaism in the world. Historically they took a very academic, scholarly approach. This is exemplified by the legendary introduction that Professor Saul Lieberman, at the time one of JTS’s top scholars, gave to a lecture by Gershom Scholem, then the world’s leading kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) scholar: “Narishkeit is narishkeit (nonsense is nonsense) – but the history of narishkeit is scholarship.”

For a long time, Conservative Judaism trained rabbis who were great scholars, but who were a little out of touch with the heart and the people. At one congregation I served, I was told one of my predecessors was such a scholar, and he would regularly give sermons that were very scholarly, and over the heads of 95% of the congregation. When the president of the shul discussed this with him, he replied, “I’m not going to dumb my message down.”

Fortunately, this attitude is changing. At the Ziegler School, where I studied, we had a professor of kabbalah and chasidut, and we weren’t studying the scholarly history of narrishkeit – we were studying Jewish mysticism, with an eye toward the ways those teachings could deepen our own spirituality and give us tools to help us bring meaning to our rabbinic work. We are finding our way back to the heart.

The other problem we have is our over-reliance on the siddur, the prayerbook. When the Temple was destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago, it meant sacrifices could no longer be offered. Sacrifices could only be offered at the Temple. What to do? The rabbis came up with a brilliant strategy: substituting prayers for animal sacrifice. Instead of offering cows we offer words. Instead of sheep and goats, we offer the Shema and Amidah.

The only problem is the rabbis went too far. They legislated a prayer for practically every activity you can think of. There’s a specific prayer you say when you hear thunder. A different prayer to say when you see a rainbow. Yet another prayer to say when you see a friend you haven’t seen in over a year (I kind of like that one – praising God who “revives the dead!”). There was an online debate among my rabbinic colleagues about whether or not one should recite a prayer when seeing a total eclipse, and if so, which prayer to say. Some sources say we don’t say a prayer for a total eclipse, because it’s considered a bad omen. When I saw the total eclipse in Oregon in August, it was a spiritual moment. It was absolutely amazing. I don’t know how anyone could witness that and not be in awe. So I did offer a blessing – and I didn’t obsess about which blessing is the technically correct blessing – I more or less said, “Wow, God, that is AMAZING!”

The problem with overreliance on the prayerbook is that it drives prayer out of our hearts and into our heads. It turns prayer into an intellectual exercise instead of an emotional experience. It does not encourage a feeling of relationship with God. What kind of relationship would you have with your spouse if the only time you talked to him or her you were reading from a book?

So what do we do? How do we find our way back to bringing our hearts into prayer, into feeling awe in the synagogue?

Some people think it would help to get rid of the Hebrew and make the service much shorter. But I don’t think that’s the answer. You can be bored in English. And an hour can seem interminable if you’re bored.

A Calvinist pastor, R. C. Sproul, said,

A recent survey of people who used to be church members revealed that the main reason they stopped going to church was that they found it boring. It is difficult for many people to find worship a thrilling and moving experience.

Sproul speaks to the solution:

“How awesome is this place!” This was Jacob’s response to being in the house of God. People do not normally feel that way in church. There is no sense of awe, no sense of being in the presence of One who makes us tremble. People in awe never complain that church is boring.

People in awe never complain that church – or synagogue – is boring. People having a spiritual experience are not bored.

How do we have that awe or spiritual experience? I suggest there are two things that can help a lot: having a personal relationship with God, and the right kavanah, intention or focus, when we do pray.

For many of us, the first step in developing a personal relationship with God is getting our heads out of the way.

It’s a fundamental teaching of Judaism that God is not corporeal. God doesn’t have a body. Yet when we read the accounts of God speaking to Moses in the Torah, it’s very personified. You can picture God looking like either the God in Michelangelo’s famous rendering in the Sistine Chapel, or perhaps as George Burns or Morgan Freeman, depending on your taste in movies, having an actual sit-down conversation with Moses. But God doesn’t talk to any of us in quite that same clear baritone voice, so we wonder what’s the point.

There’s a big philosophical debate in Judaism over whether God is involved in every detail of your life. Some people believe God is, others view God as simply an abstract force that made the Big Bang go bang, there are as many ideas about God as there are believers.

It’s entirely possible to put your intellectual ideas about God aside, and pray and talk to God as if God IS aware and concerned about the details in your life. In many ways, the God I believe in intellectually is not the same as the God I pray to. Being comfortable with that tension has allowed me to have a much richer spiritual life.

Spirituality and feeling a connection to God is a very personal thing. Different approaches work for different people. All I can share is what has worked for me on my spiritual journey.

There are two things that have helped me a great deal: making prayer a daily habit, and talking to God in my own words, literally pouring my heart out to God.

Regarding the first point, making prayer a daily habit, can you have a deep relationship with someone if you only talk to them once or twice a year? Remember when you were first in love, and needed to call (or email, or IM) your beloved at least three times a day, just to check in? That’s why our tradition tells us to pray three times a day, every day. The path to intimacy comes through spending time together. One of the ways we spend time with God is through prayer.

Making prayer a daily thing can have a profound effect on your connection with the words. Rabbi Chaim HaLevy Donin said in his book To Pray as a Jew, “if I didn’t pray three times a day because I was commanded to, I wouldn’t know how to pray when I needed to.” If you pray three times a day with the traditional liturgy, you will say the Amidah over 1000 times in one year. You develop a familiarity with the words, with the themes, that allows them to work as a guided meditation. But I do not recommend STARTING with saying the Amidah three times a day. I recommend starting with a heavier focus on the spirit than on the ritual. A great starting point is to say the Shema twice a day—even if it’s just the six words of Shema, Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. If you say them twice a day, and really focus on the meaning—Hear, O Israel, Adonai is OUR God, Adonai is ONE—it can serve as a way to remind you of God’s presence in the world and in your life.

Of all the different types of Jewish meditation I’ve tried, the one that has most influenced my relationship with God is hitbodedut, a practice recommended by the great Chasidic rebbe, Nachman of Braslav. Rebbe Nachman tells us “It is very good to pour out one’s thoughts before God, like a child pleading before its parent.” He recommends simply talking to God, sharing with God what is in your heart in your own words as a spiritual practice. Hitbodededut literally means to be alone with yourself. R. Nachman suggests spending an hour a day in hitbodedut. If you don’t have an hour, try it for fifteen or twenty minutes. I’ve found it to be a very profound experience. And it’s important to set a timer, to make an effort to have an extended conversation. My experience with hitbodedut is that it starts out pretty shallow – if I’m having a good day, it’s thanks, if I’m having a bad day, it’s complaints – but after about five minutes I have to dig a little deeper to keep the conversation going, and that’s when the experience gets more interesting. It’s also a meditation that you can do conveniently at all kinds of times, for example while you’re driving in your car. In the last year some of the best conversations I’ve had with God have been on I-20 on my way to the Atlanta airport.

In addition to setting a time for talking to God, you can cry out to God whenever the spirit moves you: it can be a plea, like Moses’ plea on behalf of Miriam, or it can even be an argument or challenge, like Abraham challenging God when told that God was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.

What God wants – and what we need – is prayer that’s genuine, that’s real. That’s from the heart. That’s way more important than saying the “right” words. It’s like the story of a simple shepherd, who every day would offer his personal prayer to God:

“God, I love you so much, that if you were here, I would give you half of my sheep. If it was raining and you were cold, I would share my blanket with you.” One day a great rabbi was walking by the field, and he heard the shepherd praying. He ran up to him, and said “do you call that praying? Are you kidding? What would God do with your sheep? Of what use would a blanket be to God? Here, let me show you to pray properly before you further desecrate God’s holy name!” The rabbi then got out a siddur, and gave a brilliant lecture on the structure and meaning of the various prayers, and explained what to say when to the poor illiterate shepherd. As soon as the rabbi left, the shepherd sat there dumbfounded. He didn’t understand a word of it. But he knew the great rabbi was quite upset that his prayers were not proper. So he stopped praying.

For too many of us, that’s where the story ends…fortunately for the shepherd, there IS more to HIS story…

Up in Heaven, God noticed the silence, and said “what happened to the beautiful prayers of my humble shepherd?” He decided to send an angel down to go and find out what was wrong. The angel found the shepherd, and the shepherd told him the whole story of his meeting with the rabbi. The angel said, “what does that rabbi know? Would you like to see how we pray in Heaven?” The shepherd instantly agreed and the angel whisked him off to Heaven, where he saw a Heavenly Host standing and proclaiming: “God, I love you so much, that if you were here, I would give you half of my sheep. If it was raining and you were cold, I would share my blanket with you.” The shepherd happily went back to his prayers, and God happily listened.

If the heart of prayer is this kind of simple crying out to God, why do we need a fixed liturgy at all?

At its best, the fixed service can help us in our efforts to connect with God. Writing good religious poetry is truly an art. Just as not all of us are concert musicians, not all of us can write Psalms as moving as the ones attributed to King David. Just as hearing a beautiful concert can elicit certain feelings which reflect something in our own souls, saying beautiful words of prayer can do the same.

While we may all recite the same words in our prayers, they will resonate with us differently on different days. I have found that often a set prayer can express a feeling better than my own words. If I want to thank God for being with me, I might say something like “thanks, God, for being there for me.” Yet when I recite Psalm 30, which reads “Lord, I cried out and You healed me. You saved me from the pit of death. Sing to the Lord you faithful, acclaiming his holiness. His anger lasts for a moment; His love is for a lifetime” I feel the words of King David do a better job of capturing what I feel than my own simple words.

The prayer service is one long guided meditation. It is designed to take us, in stages, through different aspects of our relationships with God, Israel, and Mankind. We prepare ourselves for prayer with a warm-up, by reciting psalms. We establish our relationship with God and recreate the revelation at Mt. Sinai when we say the Shema. The Amidah is the peak of the service, when we strive to achieve devekut, a cleaving with God. And we then have the closing part of the service, including Aleinu, as a way of gently taking leave, of cooling off, after an intense spiritual experience. The structured service takes us on a spiritual journey.

So how do we use that fixed liturgy as a way to talk to God?

This goes back to the second thing I said could help in having a spiritual experience in the synagogue: having good kavanah, intention and focus, when you pray.

Being aware of God’s presence is the most fundamental principle in prayer. It’s the point of prayer. Inscribed in stone above the ark behind me are the words “da lifnei mi atem omdim,” a quote from the Talmud that means “know before whom you are standing.” As you recite your prayers, if you can keep in mind that you are in the presence of God, the words will have an entirely different feeling.

But how do we achieve that knowledge? Many books have been written on that subject, and all I can do this morning is give a few hints from within our tradition.

The Talmud tells us that a person should enter two doors into the synagogue, and then pray. What is meant by two doors? The distance of two door-widths. One of the Chabad rebbes explained that this means when you enter the synagogue, you should truly enter—leaving your worries, concerns, and distractions outside. When you come into the synagogue, use that physical transition as a reminder to make a spiritual transition—that you are now present in the House of God, and you are here to pray, to talk to God. Those of you who like to arrive at the start of services know that I like to use the chanting of mah tovu for that same purpose.

And how can you talk if you don’t know what you are saying? If you don’t fully understand Hebrew, make frequent use of the translation. The Hebrew language and the music may be majestic, but it won’t be true prayer if you don’t know what you are saying. The Talmud tells us that a person can pray in any language he or she understands, as God is a polyglot who understands all languages.

Understanding the words helps, but by itself it’s not enough. If it were, there would be no such thing as a secular Israeli. The Kotzker rebbe tells us that “a little with spirit, with kavanah, is better than a lot without.” Ten minutes of REAL praying, opening your heart to God and pouring out your dreams and fears before your Maker, will do more for you spiritually than four hours of sitting and being bored – OBVIOUSLY. Find something in the prayerbook that speaks to you—whether it’s a prayer, a psalm, or a reading—and stay with it, think about it, apply it to your life. Find words of religious poetry in that book that express what YOU feel.

One of the things that can help get us out of heads is music. When our visioning effort found more music to be a high priority for the congregation, I think it was an expression of a desire for more spirituality in our services. Since Sarah Metzger has joined us, every Friday night has more ruach, spirit.

I said earlier that prayer is about developing a relationship with God. A relationship implies a two-way communication. When we pray, we talk to God. How do we hear God’s reply? For Jews, the answer is studying Torah. When we study the wisdom of our tradition—whether it is in the Torah, in the Talmud, or in the words of contemporary teachers—we are straining to hear the word of God. It has been said “my cantor helps me talk to God, and my rabbi helps God talk to me.”

If you’d like to hear God talking, please join some of my adult education programs. In the coming months, the Thursday night Essential Judaism class will be exploring many topics, including theology and prayer. The classes are free, open to the public, and you can come for the whole course or just an individual class that interests you. Next week we’re meeting on Tuesday because of Sukkot – we’ll be exploring the question of “Who’s a Jew?” and the different approaches in the Jewish world to that question. The schedule is posted online. Once we’re past all the holidays – in November – I plan to offer some “Koffee and Kabbalah” sessions.

When I find it difficult to talk to God—if I’m distracted, or distant, or agitated—I find it comforting to know that even someone on as high a spiritual level as King David sometimes had trouble praying. There is a line that we recite at the very beginning of every Amidah which King David said when he was having trouble praying: “Adonai, s’ftai tiftach ufi yagid tehilatecha,” God, open my lips and my mouth will recite your praises. Sometimes the best way to start praying is to ask for God’s help in praying.

]]>http://www.neshamah.net/2017/10/kol-nidre-5778-heart-prayer.html/feed0Rosh Hashanah 5778 Day Two – The Complexities and Beauty of Israelhttp://www.neshamah.net/2017/10/rosh-hashanah-5778-day-two-complexities-beauty-israel.html
http://www.neshamah.net/2017/10/rosh-hashanah-5778-day-two-complexities-beauty-israel.html#respondFri, 06 Oct 2017 01:07:39 +0000http://www.neshamah.net/?p=2627A few months ago I celebrated my tenth “aliyahversary,” marking ten years since the day in 2007 when I made

]]>A few months ago I celebrated my tenth “aliyahversary,” marking ten years since the day in 2007 when I made aliyah – when I became a citizen of the state of Israel and made my home in Jerusalem.

The establishment of the State of Israel, a homeland for the Jews, is, without question, the best thing to happen to the Jewish people in nearly 2,000 years. Eleven years ago on Kol Nidre I formally announced to my congregation in Toledo, Ohio, that I was making aliyah instead of staying in Toledo. I told them:

For most of the past 2,000 years, Jewish history was the story of one disaster after another. In the year 70 Romans destroyed the Temple, Jerusalem was laid waste. In 132 the Bar Kochba revolt was brutally crushed, and with it died the dream of an independent Israel. During the Middle Ages, Jews were massacred by the Crusaders on their way to “liberate” the holy land. When Christian Europe was flourishing during the Renaissance, Jews were packed into ghettos. In 1492, when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” Ferdinand and Isabel ordered the Jews of Spain to convert, flee, or die. When the Enlightenment, and citizenship, came for the Jews of Western Europe, those in the East were being killed in pogroms, a foreshadowing of the horrors that would come later during the Shoah, when a third of the Jews then alive were slaughtered by the Nazis.

We were overdue for some good news.

And then, in 1948, a miracle happened. A miracle every bit as great as the parting of the Red Sea. A miracle which shows us that God truly has not forgotten His promises to the Jewish people. In May of 1948, for the first time in 2,011 years, the land of Israel was free. An independent Jewish state was reborn on the soil of ancient Judea. More miracles followed. Tiny Israel turned back the armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, won the War of Independence, and ended up with substantially more territory than had been originally granted by the UN. And again, our tiny country defeated vastly larger Arab forces in 1967, and yet again in 1973.

The modern state of Israel is the most wonderful, exciting thing to happen to the Jewish people in the past two millennia. For 70 generations, our ancestors prayed for this day. And the day has finally come!

Yoel Bin-Nun was one of the first paratroopers to reach the site where our temple once stood in the heart of Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Here’s what he had to say about that incredible morning, as described in Yossi Klein Halevi’s book “Like Dreamers:”

“When I reached the Temple Mount that morning,” Yoel told his group, “my commander said to me, ‘Nu, Yoel, what do you say?’ I said to him, ‘Two thousand years of exile are over.’ That’s what I felt at that moment. If the Israel Defense Forces are standing on the Temple Mount, it is the end of exile. I admit I was naive. Redemption is a process; it’s complicated.”

One day, he believed, Jews would celebrate the story of modern Israel as they now celebrated the exodus from Egypt. Perhaps with even greater awe: in the ancient Exodus, after all, Jews had left a single country, while in the modern exodus they’d returned home from a hundred countries. A people keeping faith with its lost homeland and returning after two thousand years: impossible. The farther away we moved from the founding of Israel, the more extraordinary the story would appear.

One day, Yoel knew, Jews would look back at this time and wonder: How had they done it? Reclaimed land, language, sovereignty, power? Reversed the destruction of the Jews back to their origin, their vigorous youth? Replaced skeleton heaps in death camps with paratroopers at the Wall as the enduring Jewish image of the century.

Not only is it a miracle that Israel exists, what Israel has accomplished in the last 69 years is also nothing short of miraculous. The country has gone from being economically backwards and lacking in physical comforts to being an outpost of the Western World in the heart of the Middle East, a member of the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Israel’s high-tech community is second only to Silicon Valley in size, importance, and vibrancy. Israel has successfully absorbed millions of refugees and immigrants from all parts of the globe including the Arab states, the former Soviet Union, and South America.

Israel only had one TV station until 1986, and didn’t get color TV at all until 1977. People traveling to Israel used to bring toilet paper in their suitcases because of the notoriously poor quality of the only toilet paper available in Israel. Not anymore. From being a military weakling and underdog, Israel – with a lot of American help – now has the most powerful military in the Middle East, including nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them anywhere in the world.

Similar to most of Western Europe, Israel has universal health care – everyone is covered, and there are no deductibles or co-pays. Go to the hospital for major surgery and you go home with no bills, no paperwork, nothing. College tuition in Israel is $2500 a year – that right there is a great incentive to make aliyah. And the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Muslim or Christian have access to the same healthcare, education, and are represented in the legislature.

Alan Deshowitz said,

No country in the history of the world has ever contributed more to humankind and accomplished more for its people in so brief a period of time as Israel has done since its relatively recent rebirth in 1948.

And yet not everyone sees the establishment of the State of Israel in such a positive light.

Palestinians tell the story very differently. We Jews celebrate Yom Haatzmaut, Israeli Independence Day. Palestinians mark that same time period with a commemoration of what they call the “Nakba,” an Arabic word for “catastrophe.”

Here’s how the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, Dr. Riyad Mansour, describes the day:

Yesterday, 15 May 2016, marked the passage of 68 years since Al-Nakba, the tragedy in 1948 in which more than 800,000 Palestinians, 70 percent of our people, were forcibly uprooted and expelled from their homes and lands or fled in fear for their lives after brutal massacres were carried out in over 400 Palestinian towns and villages by Zionist terrorist groups in Mandate Palestine in a clear act of ethnic cleansing.…Today, Al-Nakba of the Palestinian people continues as millions of Palestinians continue to either live in exile as refugees, denied the inalienable right to return to their homes, or continue to live under Israel’s nearly 50-year old belligerent military occupation of the State of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, where they are forced to endure the constant violation of their fundamental human rights. Indeed, with the passage of each year since Al-Nakba and since the occupation of the rest of historic Palestine, not a day has gone by in which the Palestinian people have not endured more loss, human and material, as well as untold suffering and hardship.

Israelis and Palestinians have very different understandings of both recent history, and the present time.

The way the Jews tell their story, they have been in Israel continuously since the days of Joshua, 3,400 years ago, sometimes fewer in number, sometimes greater. When Jews started returning in larger numbers, in the late 1800’s, Israel was an empty place, swampy and desolate. They came home and made the desert bloom. Arabs from around the region started moving in when the Jews created a functioning economy.

The Palestinians say they have always lived here. In the late 1800’s they were peacefully minding their own business when imperial colonizers bought up land from absentee landlords, driving the local inhabitants off land they had worked for generations. Zionists, people who came from Europe and knew little about Palestine or its people, took the land away from its rightful inhabitants.

Is Israel a modern-day miracle? Or are Israelis brutal, colonialist occupiers?

Clearly, it depends on who you ask.

There’s a universal human tendency to paint “our side” as all good, and the other side as “all bad.” If you’re fighting a physical war, that may be a necessary attitude. You have to dehumanize and blame someone before you can be comfortable killing him. But the tendency to make things black and white is not helpful if the goal is peaceful coexistence, people of different backgrounds living together harmoniously. When it comes to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, I don’t see any possibility of a military victory for either side. No one is leaving this tiny scrap of land in the Middle East. We’re going to have to figure out how to get along together.

And for that purpose, I suggest we’ve been defining the “sides” the wrong way. This isn’t about Israelis versus Palestinians, or Jews versus Muslims. It’s about extremists – on both sides – versus moderates on both sides.

The extremists on both sides have a similar world view: The Jewish extremists want to get rid of the Palestinians entirely, preferably exiling them to Jordan, or perhaps accepting them as second-class citizens in a “greater Israel” that includes all of the West Bank. The Palestinian extremists want to drive “all the Jews into sea” and force them to “go back to where they came from.”

The moderates on both sides, on the other hand, are willing to “live and let live” and favor a solution that allows both Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and dignity.

For the moderates to prevail, we need to find a diplomatic solution, not a military solution, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And to find a diplomatic solution, the moderates on both sides need to understand the other side. If we’re going to be able to reach a just agreement, we need to fully appreciate and understand the issues.

Far and away the best way to do that is to go and see for yourself. Talk to people from different backgrounds and different perspectives. See the situation on the ground. Most Israelis and most Palestinians have never done that. A typical secular Israeli living in Tel Aviv has never been to an ideological settlement, and never talked to a Palestinian. A typical Palestinian has never talked to an Israeli other than a soldier at a checkpoint. So it’s no surprise we don’t understand each other well.

I’m planning a congregational trip to Israel in April, and my goal is to share with the participants the opportunity to hear from many different people and perspectives so they can form their own opinions, and develop an appreciation for just how complex the situation really is. I’m going to tell you about some of the things we’re going to see, but it’s not really a great substitute for seeing for yourself.

The first thing to understand in understanding Israel and Palestine is that Israel is like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Israel within the Green Line – the pre-67 borders – is very different than Israel beyond the Green Line, in the land that is called the West Bank, the Occupied Territories, Palestine, or Judea and Samaria, depending on your political leanings.

Within Israel, 75% of the 8 million people are Jewish; most of the other 25% are Muslim. Two percent of the population of Israel is Christian – about the same percentage of the population in America that are Jewish. Christmas is just another working day in Israel.

Within Israel, Muslim citizens have full civil rights, they carry Israeli passports, they have representation in the Knesset, they have the same access to healthcare and higher education that other Israelis have. There’s certainly still discrimination: studies have shown that if you take the same exact resume and replace a Jewish name with a Muslim name, the number of invitations to come in for an interview plummets by something like 90%. Discrimination against Muslims in areas such as housing is rampant, and largely ignored.

Does that make Israel an apartheid state, as some have accused? Certainly not.

But cross that invisible border called the “Green Line,” and everything is very very different.

Very few tour groups from overseas visit Hebron, even though it’s home to the second holiest place in the world to Jews. It’s too dangerous or too political for most tour groups. Security permitting we’ll go there in April.

Hebron is a city of over 200,000 Palestinians. It’s an important place mentioned several times in the Torah. It’s where the Cave of Machpelah is located, the cave that the Torah tells us Abraham purchased as a burial ground. Is it really the tomb of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah? There’s no way to really know, but it’s clearly been the tradition that it’s the place for thousands of years: over 2,000 years ago King Herod built the building that still stands on the site, a building believed to be the oldest continuously used intact prayer structure in the world, and the oldest major building in the world that still fulfills its original function. It’s now divided into two parts: a synagogue and a mosque, with strict separation including separate entrances.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Hebron was a much smaller city, 15-18,000 people; Jews and Arabs lived peacefully, side by side, sharing facilities such as hospitals, shops, and holy places. All that changed in 1929, when growing tensions between Jewish immigrants and native Arabs throughout Israel culminated in the massacre of 67 Jews in Hebron.

Jews fled Hebron, and no Jews lived in the city during the period when it was part of Jordan, 1948 to 1967. In 1979 a group of settlers moved into a former Hadassah Hospital in Hebron and turned into the start of a new settlement in the heart of the Palestinian city. There are now about 700 Jewish settlers living in small enclaves in the heart of a major Palestinian city.

Hebron is home to the most extreme elements in both the Jewish and Muslim populations. Palestinian terrorists have murdered dozens of Israeli settlers and soldiers; the Israeli terrorist, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Muslims who were praying at the Cave of Machpelah in 1994. Goldstein was killed by survivors of the attack who were able to overpower him. His grave is treated as a shrine by Jewish extremists.

The Israeli government decided that the only way to control the violence was to separate the populations. The only problem is the settlement is located in the heart of Hebron’s commercial district. 1,800 Palestinians shops along Shuhada Street are now closed. Some because the Israeli government ordered them closed; others, because their customers could no longer get to the shops because they were in the territory only permitted for Jews.

I’ve walked down that street. It’s eerie and heartbreaking. Think of the impact of that: every shop that’s been closed is a family that lost its way of making a living. 1,800 families whose investment in their business has been destroyed. It was only when I walked down that ghost town of a street that the impact of the settlement in Hebron really hit me. There are apartments over the shops whose owners are not allowed to access them from the street – they have to come in a back way over rooftops. Many apartments have also been abandoned because climbing over rooftops for access is just too difficult, especially for older residents.

The settlers will tell you that they are restoring a Jewish presence to a place that is important to Jews, and that had a Jewish presence for much of its history. They will tell you that the shops aren’t closed because of the occupation, but because of terrorism. The Palestinians will tell you about the personal cost of the closures, and how unfair it is that the burden falls on the Palestinians and not on the settlers.

The West Bank is divided into Areas A and B, which are under Palestinian control, and Area C, where all the settlements are located, which is under Israeli control. Palestinians who live in Areas A and B effectively live in the country of Palestine. The Palestinian Authority is the local government. Israelis are not allowed into Area A without a permit from the Israeli government, for security reasons. As an Israeli citizen, I’m not allowed to visit Ramallah or Bethlehem without permission from the government. Israel still has a huge impact on the lives of Palestinians in Areas A and B: Palestinians fortunate enough to have work permits to work in Israel have to endure hours long waits at checkpoints; Israel controls the borders and decides who can leave and who can come into Palestine. Palestinians who want to travel are not allowed to fly out of Ben Gurion airport – they have to cross the border into Jordan and fly out of Amman.

Palestinians living in Area C have a much more difficult situation. They live under Israeli military control. If they are accused of a crime, they have essentially no rights – they are tried in Israeli military courts and have no constitutional protections whatsoever. Getting to and from their homes or fields is entirely dependent on the IDF. The Israeli government would like all Palestinians to leave Area C and relocate to Areas A and B, so they intentionally make life difficult for Palestinians in Area C. For example, they refuse to grant building permits to Palestinians in Area C; so Palestinians with growing families build houses without permits, which the Israeli government then regularly destroys.

There are Israelis working to correct the injustices; as a former chairman of Rabbis for Human Rights I’m one of them. But the Palestinians don’t really want our help – they would rather just be able to live their lives. As Nasser, a Palestinian shepherd in the village of Susiya, south of Hebron said in an interview:

In 2001, as he stood at the crossroads of his life, Nasser met a small group of Jewish activists who offered solidarity to Susiya. It was confounding: Jewish soldiers were demolishing his home and protecting the settlers, and Jewish individuals were volunteering to work beside him, but Nasser wanted to be neither the target of violence nor the recipient of charity. The questions he asked himself were philosophical: How to exist freely in a place where he was not free?

I don’t want you to get the wrong impression: the political situation in Israel is NOT going to be the main focus of the trip to Israel in April. My goal is to help people get a full picture of Israel. The Israel that I know and love. And part of that picture is understanding the political situation. But there’s more – way more.

One of the things that I most love about Israel is Shabbat in Jerusalem. Shabbat in Jerusalem is unlike Shabbat anywhere else. On Friday afternoon, you can tell that Shabbat is coming. Stores start closing; traffic thins out. From any place in West Jerusalem there are literally dozens of synagogues of every variety in walking distance. Most synagogues are Orthodox, but there are also Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Renewal synagogues. There are also many different flavors of Orthodox synagogues – Yemenite, Iranian, Italian, among others. And there are Orthodox synagogues pushing the boundaries and becoming more like Conservative, with women leading parts of the prayer service.

Friday night almost everyone in Jerusalem is at a Shabbat dinner. Secular people might go out to a bar or a movie after dinner, but many of them are still together with friends or family for a Friday night meal. It’s a very different experience being Jewish in a place where we’re the majority. For our Friday night in Jerusalem I plan to organize home hospitality. Instead of a Shabbat meal in a hotel, everyone will get to have dinner with Israelis, a real Jerusalem experience.

In Jerusalem you’re surrounded by history everywhere you turn. One of my usual morning run routes in Jerusalem goes past the archeological site of Ramat Rachel, a 2,700 year old administrative center. Another morning run route crosses Gehinnom, “Hell,” and does a loop around the Old City; sometimes I take a detour and run up the Via Dolorosa, the road that Christians believe Jesus walked with his cross on his way to his execution.

Besides history, one of the most impressive things about Israel is the diversity in nature. It’s a small country – roughly the size and population of New Jersey. I’ve hiked the entire Israel Trail, which winds over 600 miles from the border with Lebanon to the border with Egypt. In the north there are mountains and pine forests; in the center, rich agricultural fields, bustling Tel Aviv, and the Mediterranean beaches. We’ll visit a winery owned by a friend of mine. In the south, there are the harsh and beautiful Negev and Arava deserts, and the Caribbean-style resort of Eilat on the Red Sea, with excellent SCUBA Diving. The Dead Sea, the lowest point on the planet at 1200 feet below sea level, is a wonder itself. Those in shape can climb to the top of Masada, where the Jewish revolt against Rome was finally snuffed out almost 2,000 years ago. Those not so athletic can ride the cable car.

Israel truly is the most amazing thing to happen to the Jewish people in 2,000 years. Every Jew should see it at least once. Every time you’re in the synagogue you say prayers for Israel and Jerusalem. Experiencing it yourself makes those prayers much more real. Our trip in April will of course include many of the “must see” sites – but it will also include much more. It will include the sides of Israel that took me years to discover.

At the end of Yom Kippur services next week we’ll shout “L’shanah haba’ah birushalayim!” Next year in Jerusalem. Let’s make it this year in Jerusalem!